


before anything else

by silklace



Series: out of a little, dark room series [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 15:25:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18055085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silklace/pseuds/silklace
Summary: August, 1995. Cataclysmic, in retrospect.





	before anything else

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place directly after the events of [to have and to hold](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413451). 
> 
> Basically, I've had the idea of taking what otherwise would be a 200K fic spanning multiple decades and transforming it into smaller pieces that could ostensibly stand on their own. Here is one such piece. 
> 
> As with [to have and to hold](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413451), the dynamics of the relationship depicted herein are not intended to be particularly easy, but desire is present on both ends of the relationship.
> 
> Finally, I am dabbling in a denser/more descriptive writing style than usual which is largely inspired by the gorgeous work of [montparnasse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse) and whom I mightily recommend.

“Fuck,” he breathes, quietly, the word coalescing like vapor in the ghostly gloaming of the night-dead house. He can’t remember what he was dreaming about, but it feels suddenly muted in his bedroom, as if all the lights had been abruptly turned out, the world gone stone quiet. 

He blinks against the darkness, gathered like soot on his skin, hard to move through with the course of not-quite panic arching through him - and that’s when he sees it – a pale flash like a jag of lightning in the dark room – and he’s already reaching for his wand when it assembles into the shape of – 

“Harry.” His wand clatters off the bedside table as his fingers go numb with relief. “Jesus.”

“Sorry, I -. Sorry.” Harry skitters backwards on his knees, folding gracelessly onto his bottom when his shoulders hit the bedroom door. His face is pale and moon-sharp. “Sorry,” he says again, hushed and remorseful, when Sirius drops backwards on the bed, putting his face in his hands like he can hide the tremor of terror still flitting along his veins if only the world would go soft and quiet and black again. 

“Hell,” he mutters, under the weight of his hands, under the weight of Harry’s blazing stare, which he can feel on him, thick like mud or something worse. It’s rather a monstrous thing, he thinks indelicately, and bites his lip to stop from laughing. “I almost hexed you, you know.”

“I didn’t mean to – to wake you,” Harry says, each word a hard, burnished stone forced up his throat. 

“Staring at a man in his sleep has a way of doing that, funny,” Sirius murmurs, but the words come out gentle, anyways. He drops his hands, wishing he hadn’t finished his last pack of cigarettes a few hours ago. He’ll have to ask Remus to pick him up more, and Remus will look at him like he’s not mad, just disappointed. If he’s lucky, they’ll have an argument about money, too. 

Harry makes a soft, throaty noise. “You were -,” he starts, but he stops so abruptly it’s like he forgot the end of his sentence, words hanging heavily in the air between them until Sirius is forced to look over.

Harry’s picking at the knee of his pyjama trousers, stretched thin over the bend of his cocked leg. By the bare inch of ankle and fair bit of shin he can see from here, he wagers they belong to Ron, or did at one point. He wonders, not for the first time, if they’re fucking. Or if Harry just wishes they were. 

_I know what that ankle feels like, cupped against my palm,_ he thinks to himself, before a spasm of horror has him pushing off the bed and reaching for the robe he dropped on the floor a few hours ago, pulling it over his bare chest. A wiser man would have started wearing proper pyjamas to bed with a house full of half-strangers and gangly adolescents, but Sirius could build a lot on the wreckage of all his foolish choices. Why stop now. 

He retrieves his wand off the floor; twelve inches of Cypress and thestral hair and surprisingly responsive to him, likely in part because when Remus had pressed it into his palm, voice quiet in the front hallway, he’d said, “It was my dad’s,” and before Sirius could say anything in response to that like _oh I couldn’t possibly_ or _how thoughtful_ or _did it make a sound? Ebony wood and unicorn hair spitting and hissing when you burned mine that December? Because I think I felt it, like a scream that started at the bottom of my feet and lodged itself under my tongue, stone heavy and just as bitter, and unstopping for the next twelve years_ , “I want you to have it,” he’d continued, shaking his dusty hair out of his eyes and nudging Sirius forward, down into the kitchen, where Sirius said hello again to people who’d believed for longer than he’d known them that he’d betrayed the only ones he’d ever loved in the world. 

When he looks over at his most recent bad choice, Harry is watching him hungrily, eyes darting away when he gets caught. There’s something stubborn in the set of his jaw, even as his face flames red, bright enough that Sirius can see it despite the gloomy shadow-gathered corner where he still sits, match-stick knees and elbows crackled in on himself, like twigs in the wilderness waiting to catch fire. 

Sirius kicks the desk chair out and drops into it, knees skewing wide as he slumps backwards, a slouch he learned to perfect by the time he was thirteen and that even his mother’s worst hissing couldn’t unfix. Not that it was just hissing she did, but he pushes that thought away before it has time to unfurl across his mind. 

“Everything alright?” he asks, aiming for even-toned and landing instead on artlessly conversational. As if it’s not three in the morning, as if he hasn’t caught Harry watching him sleep, as if he doesn’t know the exact cartography of Harry’s thighs and hips and the shaky stretch of his abdominals when he comes. 

“Fine.”

Sirius snorts. The impulse for a cigarette ratchets up exponentially. 

“I _am_ ,” Harry says, mulishly. “You were the one – making noises in your sleep.”

“Ah.” He taps his knuckles on the underside of the desk, a shard of a memory surfacing - James crawling into his bed once after Christmas break, the pink, stripped marks on his back still stinging, body so restless it was like it belonged to someone else; James’ voice still dropping, the way it had cracked in half around the middle of, “If you don’t stop thrashing around I’m going to levitate you to the top of the astronomy tower,” then, his name, mumbled sleepily and rather more tenderly into the back of Sirius’ neck because the only way he could sleep was on his stomach; James’ palm sliding over his wet face once and then slipping over the shell of his ear, “Go the fuck to sleep,” and Sirius had, dropping off into sleep so easily that it was like walking over a threshold, James curled up next to him, everything finally quiet. 

Like any good shard, that memory pulls blood, too, only he can’t remember when it was, exactly – which Christmas had it been that he’d got into a screaming match with his mum over the muggle records he’d played endlessly, locked in his room and writing letters that he never sent to James and Remus and Peter, too, though sometimes memory is a small mercy and usually, now, when he does remember, it’s like Peter never existed – written out of his recollections of Hogwarts and the fragile, precious years afterwards, like all the places where he would be – where he _was_ \- have simply dissolved, peeled off, and disappeared into the place where things go not exactly to die but to simply not be. A kind of reverse existence. There and then not. The best kind of magic trick, and Sirius knows it’s a small mercy but lately the mercies have been so _small_. 

It couldn’t have been later than fourth year, he reasons, because James grew chest hair the summer before Sirius left home, and by that point he’d stopped crawling into Sirius’ bed at night – well, stopped at least until they’d left Hogwarts and Sirius, touch-starved and buried in his fifth whiskey in James and Lily’s living room, explained that after a brief and confusing period when he was fifteen which they absolutely did not need to talk about, he rather wanted to snog James as much as he’d like to snog a hippogriff, and just because he liked cock didn’t mean he wanted James’ cock, and wouldn’t it all be a bit simpler and involve a lot less dog hair on their collective furniture if James would just give him a cuddle every now and again and it didn’t have to be like a thing, capital t, after all, did it now, and James had said, _come here you enormous poof,_ spreading his arms and even his legs on their battered, orange-striped couch while Lily snickered into her own tumbler of whiskey, and when Sirius had – rather more tentatively than he was known to do - crawled in between James’ legs, let his head rest on the hel-lo, hel-lo, hel-lo of James’ chest, tucking his hands up into James’ armpits and ignoring his squawk, it felt like his skin fit again, finally, finally with James’ hand in his hair and Lily eyeing them like she was looking for the softest bits to elbow when she deigned to join them, and when James had said, _well, this rather explains all the aggressive nudity in fifth year,_ Sirius bit him on his bony chest, very gently, and James had squawked, again, a noise he was pretty good at by the time Lily was finished with him, and muttered, _bad dog_ , and Sirius had threatened to bring fleas in; and mostly it had gone on like that for a while until it hadn’t gone on like that anymore, at all, ever again, one day your best friend was touching you on the soft skin behind your ear to tell you he loves you and the next day he was dead. 

Magic tricks.

He blinks. Harry is watching him, like he’d like to ask, _where did you go?_ only he won’t let himself. Maybe he doesn’t want to know the answer. More likely, he doesn’t think he has the right to ask the question, which, Sirius thinks, rather goes out the window once you’ve had your godfather’s tongue up – _don’t think of that._

He clears his throat. “Did your muggles ever let you read anything properly instructive?”

Harry pulls a face, mouth twisting in a tight, corkscrew curl of repressed misery that no 15-year-old should know how to make, _not yet_ , Sirius thinks, _not yet, not yet._ “They’re not my muggles,” he protests. He shrugs, a heave of overly casual disinterest, picking speculatively at the hole in his trouser knee. “What do you mean, anyway?”

“Bad dreams,” Sirius mutters. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.” He leans down to thumb through the stack of books he’s accumulated over the last couple of weeks, half of them pilfered out of hiding places around the house, the other half given to him by Remus, mouth sober and small, who’d made a half-noise of deprecation when Sirius had asked, bemused, “You kept these?”

“I -,” Remus said, tongue at the corner of his mouth. “I tried not to, but then -,” and he’d shrugged, ruffling the hair at the back of his neck, looking bewildered and a little lost and all of fifteen again, watching his best friends turn into animals for him, shift the very soul and meat of their flesh for him, moon-dappled and frightened at the enormity of what he could lose. 

Sirius mostly tries not to think about how he had, how they all had, lost everything all at once, candle-snuffing quick, and all the lessons his bright, good-hearted friend learned from it – how to let go, over and over again, which meant never holding on that strongly in the first place. 

“What’re you looking for?” The floorboards creak under Harry’s shifting attempt to peer over. 

“This,” Sirius says, tongue between his teeth, drawing a small, dogeared paperback from the middle of the pile and tossing it to Harry, who catches it without looking away. 

“Go on,” Sirius says, and Harry breaks his gaze to thumb the spine of the book and read out:

“Hamlet?” He makes a funny noise, and Sirius realizes a beat too late that it’s the sound of genuine surprise. “Shakespeare. Really?”

Sirius scoffs, though he can’t keep the shiver of a grin off his face. “Now we see the true tragedy unfold,” he says, leaning back on his chair again, one arm over the edge of it, a little rakish. “Boy’s grown up without a proper education! No one to sit on him and make him read all the classics. Moony’d weep.”

It is a tragedy, in the cleanest and purest sense of the word, except if Sirius stops smiling now he’s not sure he’ll remember how to again, and Harry’s looking at him like they’re the only two people in the world, certainly the only two who have ever existed in this room, in this moment, in the long drawn out hull of the summer, cracked open and dry and waiting to see what tinder there is to rub up against. 

Harry rolls his eyes, mouth quirking at the corners. “It’s a bit…well, dense - isn’t it?” He’s holding the book between thumb and forefinger, and his nose is scrunched up in skepticism. 

“You get used to it. Easier when you say it out loud. Anyway, Moony wasn’t all that interested in Shakespeare, had a thing for Irish poets, but your dad thought it was funny. All the monologues. Used to do them at the top of his lungs in the middle of the Quidditch pitch for a laugh. Or to get your mum to look at him.”

Harry looks thoughtful, thumbing through the book and raising small galaxies of dust motes between his palms. He doesn’t ask about James or Lily or seem particularly interested in talking about them right now, which surprises Sirius until Harry says, overly casual, “You could come over and sit on me now, if you like. Make up for lost time,” and then he’s not surprised, not exactly, not unless surprise feels like a stone dropping in your belly, the one you were holding and waiting to drop, listening hard for the hollow sound of it to reverberate through your skull again. 

“Hmm,” Sirius says, throat gone dry. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, not yet. He wonders if Harry even knows what he’s asking, then remembers the way he’d hissed for Sirius to fuck him last week, mouth a bright red gash and hips twisting sinuously under the flicker of firelight, and thinks probably he does. 

Sirius shifts in his chair, and they listen to the house creak and settle, laughing at them, a ghoulish, dry flutter of noise like dead leaves or bones bleached dry by the sun. Finally, Sirius unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth and says, “Molly and Arthur are a floor below us, you know,” which is, he knows, not really a no. 

Harry shrugs. “I can be quiet,” he says, which they both know isn’t exactly true but doesn’t stop heat from rushing over Sirius, scraping along the shape of his bones; parched heat; licking heat; heat that suffocates everything else, and he remembers a time when he thought he’d never, ever be warm again. 

“’Sides,” Harry continues, looking determined, though Sirius suspects that might be his baseline state, “it’s not like they’ve – er, they’re not light sleepers, that’s all,” he finishes, going pink now of all times for reasons beyond Sirius’ ability to fathom. 

“How do you reckon that?”

“Well,” Harry says, throwing his shoulders back, “they haven’t woken up before, and I’ve been coming up here for a – a bit. Since – well. You know.”

Sirius stills. Well. There goes his rather desperate hope that Harry’s midnight visitation was the first and only of its kind. He gives Harry, who is pointing his chin up in a way that reminds Sirius rather painfully of Lily and Regulus all at once, a considering look. “No wonder you’ve been so tetchy lately. Sleep-deprived, aren’t you?” He hesitates not at all long enough before the words are out of his mouth: “Get in the bed, then.”

Harry looks up at him, mouth dropping open gently in surprise. He’s been worrying his lip all night – it looks berry-dappled and slick now, and Sirius thinks, probably, that the dementors did unscrew something inside of himself that can never go right again, turned him into a half-dead thing that only knows the shape of longing, the swell of it, fitted underneath his chest, an empty bowl of want, want, want. 

Harry’s look of surprise doesn’t last very long; he pulls himself quickly up off the floor like he thinks Sirius might retract the offer. He narrows his eyes, shrewd, half-boy, half-petulance. 

“You’re not just going to hold me again, are you?” He directs the question at his own fingers twisting the hem of his t-shirt, and Sirius can’t figure out if it’s accusation or wish or some awful combination of both. 

There’s really not enough laughter in this terrible, half-mad house.

He leverages himself out the chair. “No, you tosspot,” he says, pushing Harry one-handed into the bed and grabbing the book off the floor from where he was sitting. “I’m going to read to you,” he says, and he smiles his most obtuse, blandest smile. 

Harry rolls his eyes, gone pink again from Sirius rough-housing him into the bed, and offers too quickly, “You could at least take off your robe,” in a voice so reasonable it veers around the corner and lands instead in absolutely barking, tree-shaking, wind-splintering madness. 

“You absolute tart,” Sirius grins, kneeing up onto the bed, half-wild with some strange combination of giddy nervousness and surging affection. 

He tugs Harry’s ankle up and kisses the sharp bone he finds there, not able to stop himself, not even if he was trying, which he rather isn’t, not with Harry splayed out on his musty bedsheets, t-shirt rucked up to his ribs and grinning at Sirius like he’s the brightest and most exciting and dizzying thing he’s ever seen. 

“Right,” he breathes out, dropping on all fours over Harry, not missing the soft sighed out noise of pleasure Harry makes when he does it. “I’ll uh,” he says, sliding his nose in a gentle nuzzle along Harry’s jaw, his cheek. It’s the only place they’re touching, skin against skin, and every one of Sirius’ nerves is alight. “I’ll take my robe off as long as you promise to -,” he swallows, then lets the word drop against his tongue, rolls around in the pleasure of it, of pressing it into the smooth skin of Harry’s blushing cheek with his own filthy mouth, “behave.”

“Fuck,” Harry whispers, explosive, like starbursts going off between them. 

“Starting off on the wrong foot there, I think,” he says, laughter in his voice, and he pushes himself up again and tugs the robe off, pushing under the covers, and he isn’t stupid enough to pretend that Harry’s not watching and wanting, wanting and watching, the same thing really, after all. 

Harry falls asleep against his shoulder, hair an inky spill and mouth a soft shape in sleep, around the time that Hamlet is banishing Ophelia to a nunnery, and Sirius tells himself that’s it, that’s all it is, that it’s not going to be anything other than this, Harry’s breath on his collarbone and Sirius’ hand in his hair. Just that – nothing more, and everything all at once.

He says it again – _nothing more,_ like a litany or a prayer or the words to a spell he dreamed up inside his own head to make him good again - when Harry comes back the next night, and the next, and the next, and then it all gets swallowed up on the night thereafter when he’s fitting his mouth against Harry’s after all, a doomed prophecy written on the shape of his bones. _You will kill what you love most in the world._

 

 

“Alright?” The room is honey-warm and golden-eyed, candlelight shuddering across their frames, long and lean and close on the bed, matchstick parts set against each other and rasping a crooked howl into the night. They’ve been kissing for so long Sirius’ mouth is tender with it, tingling where he can feel the gentle nudge of Harry’s mouth returning his own searching kisses. He sets his fingers on Harry’s jaw, soft as the wing-tips of moths, and licks at his bottom lip, imagines he can taste the sweetness there on his tongue. “Should you go back to your room?”

A couple of nights ago, before they’d started this, before Harry had stopped waiting for Sirius to push him into bed and would spend the first hour huddled against the door like a watchful shadow, they’d been sitting quietly, not really talking, Harry making painstaking efforts to read Sirius’ latest dogeared book – this time, an extremely battered copy of Yeats that he vaguely remembers stealing from Remus in their sixth year – though Sirius suspected he was mostly flicking through it for the notes he and Remus and sometimes James had littered throughout its pages, when Harry had said, “Alright, this one’s not bad.”

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” He’d shifted to his feet, eyes still trained on the paperback as he slid up onto the bed, pulling his knees to his chest and perching his chin on them to read out, “’Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ Bit grim, but – it’s not far off, is it?”

He looked over expectantly. Sirius wanted to tell him, _You were supposed to hate me after what happened_ but he’d have to be ten times the fool he’s playing now not to see the way Harry adores him, from the jut of his determined chin all the way down to his bare shins and caught smack in the middle of how he looks at Sirius sideways, beneath his lashes, like he’s waiting to be caught watching. In that moment, Sirius had wanted to tug him in by the back of his neck, rub his stubbled cheeks over the smooth stretch of his throat, lick him from chin to temple, but he didn’t, he hadn’t, had known that it wouldn’t be right, that it would crack everything between them all the way through. 

And now, here they are, with Harry looking up at him sleep mussed and dozy and lips the color of August burnt at the edges, and Sirius knows that it has cracked them all the way through, broken open and blood-wet in the middle. He certainly knows it by the way Harry’s eyes have gone half-lidded and curse dark, his ankle sliding up the back of Sirius’ thigh; how he keeps baring his throat to Sirius like he’s got an idea of how two wild creatures find their way towards each other in the middle of the night; worse, though, he knows it by the way his heart is beating madly, like a sickening thing left for dead and waiting for relief only to find that survival is an instinct after all – that the heart will go on thumping and the blood will want out and the hands will reach for the softest, brightest, loveliest thing to hold on to again.

It’s like that, he thinks, smoothing Harry’s hair back off his forehead where it’s gone a little damp; _you’re the loveliest thing._ He wants to bury his nose there, where the smell of him – boy and sweat and god, the fucking treacle tart they had for pudding, sugar sweet and still clinging to him – is sharpest. He settles for kissing him there, on the temple, instead. “Maybe you should, hm, pup?”

It’s late, the moon a half-sickle in the treacherous sky, though no later really than any other night this past week, only – tonight Harry’s been peeled out of his clothes by Sirius’ own hands and is arching up to rub his hard prick against any part of Sirius he can rut against. 

“Not yet,” Harry pants, licking at the tip of Sirius’ thumb where it’s set against the corner of his mouth. “Please.”

Sirius keeps his thumb there, presses a little, and seals his own mouth against Harry’s lips, thumb like an anchor, like a wedge: will you open up for me?

Harry does, going boneless, shoulders collapsing backwards, mouth slackening, letting Sirius push his thumb and his tongue inside him, both at once, like he’d take whatever Sirius wants to feed him, honey or poison, and Sirius once read that arsenic tastes like marzipan, sweetens in water to some strange combination of apple and almond, sweet and slaking and filling your veins up with death, death, death while you smile and ask for more, and he pulls away, shuddering against Harry, eyes fluttering closed, breath quickening with horror which Harry mistakes for lust or something worse, smiling a little and leveraging up to kiss Sirius once, softly, and to say, even softer: “I like this,” like it’s a secret, and it is, isn’t it? The worst kind of secret, the worst kind of thing he’s ever done and he killed his best friends, he would know.

He tips his head against Harry’s cheekbone. He can feel Harry’s pulse everywhere, throbbing like a spasm in the very thread of the air around them. “I love you,” he says. He doesn’t say, _You’re the only thing keeping me here_ and he doesn’t say, _I’ll never forgive myself for this_ and he doesn’t say, _If anyone found out they’d have me put down_. “I love you, and I don’t want you to ever forget that, okay?”

Harry swallows; Sirius doesn’t see it, but he feels it, against his fingertips, against his chest, in the mirror movement of his own body. “Okay.”

Enough. It’s enough. Sirius pulls back onto his knees between the sprawl of Harry’s legs and sweeps his hair out of his eyes. “Now it’s time for you to walk that lovely cock of yours back to your room, isn’t it?” He drags a finger down the pulse-pink throb of Harry’s prick, so hard it’s flat against his belly, and seethes with a kind of unholy desire. 

“Oh,” Harry says, a half-sob from somewhere behind his teeth as his cock actually jumps, seeking touch, starving for it, a fat drop of precome slicking the head. “Please, Sirius.”

Sirius hooks his pants off the bedpost, starts tugging them up Harry’s legs. He kisses his shin, the knob of his left knee, says goodbye to that beautiful cock with a kiss on the head of it that has Harry crying out again, spine curling forward in a spasmodic whimper of arousal. “Go on,” Sirius says, even as he flattens himself over Harry again to kiss his throat, his jaw, the point of his chin. “Go and wank yourself raw, pup. Put your fingers in your mouth if you have to, to keep yourself quiet, and fuck your hand like you’re desperate to right now, so hot with it you think you’re going to explode, don’t you?” Harry whimpers, nodding furiously, hands on Sirius’ back and trying to pull him closer, like he wants to crawl inside of him or for Sirius to crawl inside of him, one terrible ouroboros with both of them never to meet again, furiously chasing after each other. 

He kisses Harry on the mouth, whispers feverishly against his slack lips, “Fuck your fist, pup, and think of me, my tongue on you, my mouth moving over your cock; fuck it like you’re fucking my mouth or my arse, if you’d rather, and don’t go slow.” The smell of precome is making his mouth water; he’ll never get the stink of it out of his sheets. “Pump your hips and fuck your fist and push your fingers into your mouth and think of me, and when you see me tomorrow at breakfast with everyone around us, I’ll know what you were doing just a few hours earlier, and you’ll know that I was stuck up here doing the same thing to myself, wanking over you, and your beautiful cock, and wanting the taste of you in my mouth.”

In the end, he smokes three cigarettes staring up at the curl of the sneering moon and goes to sleep with the taste of ashes in his mouth. 

 

 

Halfway through August there’s an Order meeting that ends with him, white-knuckled and unable to swallow the fifth sneering comment from Snape, biting out that maybe the reason Snape always hated James so much was actually a fit of misguided homoeroticism, to which, Snape, momentarily speechless, recovered rather impressively in the stretch of three seconds, cocked his head to the side, and told him projection was an ugly and patently desperate look on him, after all. 

Sirius had barked a laugh, ignoring the uncomfortable mutterings around the table. Tonks’ mouth was slightly open, and Molly was actually physically clutching her collar. Remus was half out of his seat when Sirius had replied that it wasn’t the first time Snape had called him a cocksucker, and perhaps he doth protest too much, eh? and Snape had curled his lip back and suggested unpleasantly and in a way that sounded rehearsed that perhaps the Order should continue their round-the-clock surveillance of Harry, given that it seems unwise to leave him alone with a godfather prone to fits of imagining his friend has returned, reincarnated, in the body of a 15-year-old boy. 

Remus had said, sharply, “Severus,” but Sirius was already vaulting across the table. In the end, he’d walked away with a split lip and an enormous bruise on his chest from where Dumbledore’s quietly sonorous, “Enough,” had pushed him back into his seat with the force of a battering ram, and when Snape had left in a whirl of black robes, Sirius had spat the taste of Snape’s own blood at his feet, bitter all the way down. 

He withdraws afterwards to feed Buckbeak which serves the dual purpose of avoiding Remus, as Buckbeak apparently can smell the wolf and never bows for him. He stares at the feathers and shit and ferret blood and is viciously, violently pleased at the three-inch claw-gouges decorating his mother’s mahogany floors. Later, he steals downstairs to the courtyard, all crumbling brick and overgrown ivy the only thing left alive, and smokes three cigarettes on the stone bench in the corner, the one half-hidden behind garden wall, before he hears the unmistakable sound of rubber trainers on the path behind him. 

He spares a desperate hope that Molly had actually managed to confiscate the last of the kids’ extendable ears before today’s Order meeting. He blows a thick stream of smoke at the moon, the sliver of it that’s visible under the haze of clouds and light pollution, and says, quietly, “You’re not supposed to be out here.”

“Neither are you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an escaped convict, I don’t know if you remember. Not really one for rules.” Sirius looks over his shoulder – Harry’s limned in silver moonlight, carving out the swell of his bottom lip, the vicious cut of his cheekbone, his jaw already knife-edged, and as it always is lately, set hard in determination. He’s watching Sirius, wary and hungry, and Sirius thinks, _He’s the only person in the whole world who loves me._

“Come over here,” he says, and Harry does, soft sound halfway between a snort and a sigh escaping his throat before he trudges over, standing awkwardly in front of Sirius, like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands or legs or arms or the whole of his trembling, yearning body. 

Sirius snorts. “Jesus, unclench, lad, alright?” He pats the stone next to him. “Go on,” he says, and takes a drag off his cigarette as Harry drops next to him, pulling one ratty trainer up on the ledge of the bench and slouching over his bent knee. He probably thinks it makes him look unconcerned: Sirius wants to tell him it makes him look like a bit of crumpled parchment; pale and undone and like he thinks he’s been forgotten. 

“Heard there was a fight,” Harry says, voice always halfway towards uncertain and obstinate, so that mostly it just cracks right down the middle and reveals all the desperate, vibrating heart of him. 

“Did you now,” Sirius says around an exhale. 

Harry tilts his head back, watching the smoke curl and hiss into the night air, dissipating. There and then not, nothing to remember it by except the lingering burn of tobacco on the summer hazy air. “Yep,” he says, sounding a bit more relaxed. “Mrs. Weasley used the word “appalling” no less than five times to describe it, you know.”

Sirius nearly laughs. “Hm, might be a record, that. I do live to impress.”

Harry hums, like a burr caught in his chest. “Can I have a drag?”

Sirius slants a look at him. Harry’s looking back, moonlight glinting off his glasses, like he’s waiting for Sirius to tell him no. Fuck that, Sirius thinks distantly and raises the cigarette to Harry’s mouth. He parts his lips, whether in surprise or anticipation, Sirius can’t say. “Did you want a drag,” he asks, as Harry’s cheeks hollow on an inhale, “or were you just looking to put your mouth on something my mouth has already been on?”

Harry chokes, thin body flexing and bowing under the wrack of his cough. Sirius rubs his back, up the ridges of his spine, down the curve of muscle where his t-shirt is sticking damply to his skin, and tries not to think about how this would look if someone were to stumble out of the house and find them tucked up in a corner of the garden, bodies rumbling towards each other inexorably under the shaking moon. 

“Arsehole,” Harry says weakly, once he’s mostly recovered.

Sirius grins at him. He wants Harry to climb into his fucking lap. 

He sticks the cigarette back in his mouth. “You coming up tonight?”

Harry flicks a look at him. “D’you want me to?” he asks, like the shape of him hasn’t been carved into the particular topography of Sirius’ bedsheets every night since the first night. 

Sirius drops the cigarette end into a patch of dead roses. His mother used to keep them in every room in the house. He doesn’t say, _do you know the smell of them makes me retch now?_ and he doesn’t say _sometimes in Azkaban I used to dream of her coming to visit, hands full of dead roses; she’d feed them to me one by one until I choked, throat full of thorns_ and he doesn’t say, _If it were possible to smell like the opposite of something, you would smell like the particular and exact inverse of rose petals_. 

He looks over his shoulder. The house stands like an eyeless goliath, unholy and unblinking. When he turns back, Harry’s shoulder brushes against his own. 

“Do I want you to come up,” he parrots, voice dropping low into the space and breadth between them. Harry’s gaze is fixed on him, moving from his eyes to his mouth to watch the words forming between them; Sirius thinks he can tell the moment Harry’s pulse quickens, can taste the hot blood of him from here. “Do I,” he says, leaning in closer, watching the mirror sway of Harry into him, towards him, the pink flash of his tongue swiping against his lip. The hair at Harry’s temples is a little damp, sticking to his skin. “Do I want you to, Harry. Do I want you. Do I,” he breathes, and lets the rest of the words get pushed into Harry’s mouth; _here are all the ways I will say yes to you, again and again and again; here is the shape of them, dredged up from the bottom of my bones, only for you_. 

 

 

When he sees Snape the following week at another interminable Order meeting, he doesn’t exactly muster anything approaching friendliness or really even bland impartiality, despite Remus’ best efforts to generate enough mild detachment for the both of them for the rest of their quaint fucking days, but he does manage to bite his tongue on the worst of it. 

“See,” he says, without rancor, as the Order files out in pairs and small clusters. Remus is watching Tonks with a kind of mild curiosity; all of the faint longing of him exists in one small frown line on his forehead. Sirius wants to tell him he’s going to bust something if he keeps it up like this, that no one man alone should contain all that noxious yearning and frankly it’s coming off him in wafts, but instead he says, “I’m an adult. I behaved.”

Remus drags his gaze away from where Tonks is showing a begrudgingly impressed Fleur the burn mark that skids up the length of her forearm. He raises his eyebrows at Sirius. “The trick really was always more about getting you to keep behaving. More responsive to the newspaper than the bone, sort of thing.”

“Right.”

Remus’ face softens. “Old dog, new tricks,” he says lightly. 

“Oh, ugh,” Sirius says, jabbing a finger in the vague direction of his face with the same hand holding his whiskey tumbler. “Please don’t.”

“Sorry,” Remus says unapologetically. He takes a swig of his own whiskey and makes a face, chin half-tilted; it’s the kind of face he makes when he’s thinking intensely about something, like whether the runic dictionary they found in Orion’s study the other night is going to curse their fingers to fall off if they touch it or what godforsaken patch of moor or uninhabitable, crumbling building so alienated from human touch that it’s acceptable for him to seek shelter in for the next full moon while his body breaks and reforms and breaks open again will be serviceable for this month’s lesson in How to Break Every Bone in Your Body and Go On Living Once a Month Every Month for the Rest of Your Life. Abruptly he says, “Do you think Tonks and Fleur are fucking?”

Sirius snorts. “You have seen the way Tonks looks at her every two seconds in the middle of meetings, and the way Fleur pretends not to notice it, then, I take it?” Unbidden, an image of Harry at dinner last night, eyes flicking over to Sirius every seventh word rises in his mind. He swallows the last of his whiskey; it licks a clean burn all the way down. 

“Damn,” Remus says quietly. 

That night, when Harry comes to him, he casts a silencing charm and shows Harry how to straddle his shoulders, knees up by Sirius’ chin. 

“Oh my god,” Harry breathes, fingers trembling on the crown of Sirius’ head. His other hand is planted on the headboard, nails scrabbling against the wood. Sirius wants him to come so hard he sees stars and told him so not ten minutes ago with his tongue in his mouth and Harry flat on his back, trying to hitch Sirius’ hips to fuck into the cradle of his spread legs. Instead, Sirius had coaxed him to his knees, sucking on his tongue and drawing unknowable patterns on his skin with the tips of his fingers. 

“Fuck my mouth,” he says now, encouragingly, tonguing wetly at the side of Harry’s cock. Harry makes an unintelligible noise, bitten through with hesitation and Sirius purses his lips into a sucking kiss, mouth aching for the shape of Harry’s cock, ruthless and obliterating. “You won’t hurt me.”

“Sirius,” Harry says, haltingly, even as his hips jerk forward unbidden. 

Sirius thinks of the Order meeting. Snape’s fingers were stained with belladonna and Sirius could taste it in the back of his throat, bitter and choking, while Snape had made sidelong comments about his appearance, mental stability, intellectual acumen, bravery or the lack thereof, and relationship with Harry – increasingly laden with innuendo and in that order. Remus had touched him, once, on the inside of his elbow, and everyone had pretended not to notice. 

He’s not thinking of that right now, though, not with Harry trembling above him like a live wire ready to spark and hiss and burn the whole place down around them. “C’mon, pup,” he rumbles, brushing his mouth along the turret of his bony hip. 

The first time he’d used the nickname, it had tumbled out his mouth before he knew what to do with it: Harry had been quiet, straining up towards him in the bed, mouth slack and open. At the touch of a new name on his brow, he’d gone still and silent, eyes slanting up like he was afraid Sirius was making fun of him. Or worse, making fun of them. Sirius hadn’t laughed. 

Harry’s knee was a lock around his hip; his face looked half bewildered. 

“I don’t – I won’t call you that, if it makes you. If you don’t like it,” Sirius said, fumbling in the dark. 

“I don’t dislike it,” Harry mumbled, voice quick and low. 

Sirius waited, but mostly Harry could always wait him out, toe to toe, pace for pace. Sirius thought about cupboards and cells – the silence in them was enormous, patient, unrelenting. The kind of silence that taught a lesson: each word costs you something, whether you pay for it now or later in some half-fashioned dream. 

He swallowed. “Not exactly a resounding declaration there, Harry.”

Harry closed his eyes. His voice was small. “I liked it.”

“Are you certain?”

Harry’s eyes were still screwed up. He ducked his chin into the crook of Sirius’ neck. “I think I liked it too much.”

Oh, Sirius thought, and that was it. The entire thought. Oh.

Now, Harry makes a noise like an animal with its paw caught in the jaws of a wiretrap, pained and wishful, something unfathomable curling over his face. “D’you -,” he pants, pushing his hips so his cock slides along the catch of Sirius’ lips, his chin. 

“I fucking do,” Sirius grunts, thumbs on Harry’s hips. “I want you, c’mon, pup,” he urges, and Harry does, and Sirius falls after him, like he always will, like he has been doing since he dragged himself, wet and terror-shivering, from the sea and turned towards Harry like a north star, before anything else. 

 

 

“D’you think,” Remus asks, turning towards Sirius in a way that makes the firelight catch on his hair and burnish it amber-stricken, “that the problem is that she thinks that we’re,” he gestures between the two of them; a wonky little flick of his fingers that says _I’m angling for astonishingly, mind-numbingly smashed and have only just managed a little bit pissed, so give me a second_ , “that we’re – you know.” He looks meaningfully at Sirius from beneath his overlong fringe. 

“I don’t, actually.” He tips the firewhiskey against his mouth. There’s a massive spiderweb stretching across one corner of the high-eaved ceiling that Molly hasn’t fixated on eradicating just yet. Or maybe she’s taken pity on the little blighter, the way she has a soft spot for anything underfed and underhugged unless your name begins with Bl- and ends in -ack, and Sirius supposes it’s probably something alright with the world that the Black name finally buys you nothing. That’s one thing he can be proud of – he took the name and ground it by the heel underfoot, like he’d been threatening to do since he turned thirteen and Regulus had spent their Easter holidays putting Soothing Solution on his back with a long, white fingertip, and that’s what Sirius remembers best about Regulus – his beautiful, ethereally long fingers – 

“Well,” Remus says, unsteadily, in the tone of a man pretending he’s only had a reasonable amount to drink. His suitcase stands in the corner from where he’d dropped it, not yet unpacked, a couple of hours ago. Sirius imagines he can smell the wild moors on it but that’s either his addled imagination or the whiskey. “That you and I. That we’re, you know, having it off with each other.”

“I’m not having it off with anyone,” Sirius says quickly. 

“I know that,” Remus says. His voice is eminently reasonable and a little too kind. “I didn’t say you were.” 

Sirius grunts. He tips more whiskey into his mouth, ignoring Remus’ huff of annoyance and pointed slide of his cup forward. “Unless you count what me and Moody get up to sometimes under the table at Order meetings.”

Remus flexes his toes. “And I do.”

“Naturally.”

Remus slides his teacup forward again, and Sirius relents and tops some whiskey into it. “Ta. All I’m saying is that at the last meeting, Vance congratulated me on making an honest man out of you.” He looks extremely morose. 

“Dear god.”

Remus makes an agreeable noise. “If only they knew it was James you were always after.”

Sirius can feel the twitch in his eye starting up. “I was fifteen, you arsehole.”

“And you certainly did not know what to do with yourself about it,” Remus says, fondly, not really looking at Sirius anymore, leaning back and stretching his long legs out in front of him, eyes fixed on something in the corner of the room that is clearly not anything to do with the corner of the room. “But by god you were going to punch someone about it, weren’t you? Every day for about six months.”

Sirius smiles, just a little. “James was going through a phase where he was allergic to shirts. It made me a bit. Off-kilter.”

“That’s one word for it.” He smiles, vaguely, toying with a curl of hair. “He probably liked the attention, truthfully. That’s one difference between him and Harry, at least. Other than the eyes.”

Sirius takes a sip of his whiskey. “Mmm.” He’s not looking at anything really, except for the shape of the cup in his hands, the way it takes up space in the empty curl of his palm. He wants to go upstairs; he can hear the sounds of the creaking house moving about them, soft footsteps on the floorboards as the other occupants are readying for bed. Remus got home late, and late was hours ago. “They’re not really – anything alike, I find,” he says, as if he’s commenting on a particularly interesting smudge of dirt on the threadbare rug. 

“Dumbledore talked to you, then, about the station.” It’s not really a question, so Sirius doesn’t answer it. “Jesus. Don’t be an idiot, Sirius.”

He crosses his legs, ankle making a cracking sound. Upstairs, there’s a bright burst of muffled laughter. “Ta, Moony.” He grimaces. “Let’s go back to talking about how everyone thinks we’re star-crossed lovers, shall we?”

“Sirius -”

“Or we could speculate wildly about how Tonks will ever be able to choose between you and the willowy, blond, half-veela she spends half her time about with, and what a tough fucking choice that will be.”

Remus sighs. “Fine. Go to the station.”

The quiet unfolds around them. Remus flexes his toes again, determined to act as though it’s not an awkward silence. Finally, Sirius mutters, “It’ll make Harry happy.”

“For about thirty minutes. And then it’ll make him feel guilty, for who knows how long.” He sounds very tired. 

Sirius looks up at him. He can hear the sound of a door creaking open upstairs. “It’s not his fault,” he says, the words scraped out of his throat like rust sloughing off, musical and discordant. “It wouldn’t be, I mean.”

“I know that,” Remus says, quietly, eyes softening again. “Does he, though?”

 

 

“Does Ron ever ask where you go at night?”

There’s a smear of chocolate on Harry’s lip. They’re in their pants, the window above Sirius’ bed cracked to let in the lightest touch of summer breeze and starlight, backs against opposite ends of bed posts and legs sprawled in front of them. Every so often, Sirius nudges Harry’s toes with his own, and Harry hides his grin behind the textbook he’s pretending to study, and both of them ignore the way Harry’s had an erection since Sirius kissed him against the door an hour ago. Between rumpled sheets, parchment and books and quills and a chocolate wrapper are strewn about; Harry’s balancing an inkpot precariously on the ledge of the headboard and Sirius is considering putting his cigarette out on the footboard. Apparently the teacup he was using for an ashtray has been swallowed by the quilt sometime in the last thirty minutes since he last needed it. 

Harry looks at him over the top of his book.

Sirius pulls a last drag from his cigarette and extricates the teacup from underneath a copy of _Anna Karenina._ He’d started reading it after Harry had returned from his hearing practically trembling with relief, and so far has mostly managed to stave off Remus’ disappointed looks every time he sees him with it. The last time he’d read it, he’d been nineteen and Caradoc had just figured out he’d rather like a wife and children and a tidy flat if he was going to die in a war before he was thirty anyways, all of which were things Sirius could not provide, no matter how much he willed it or pretended to enjoy weekends at home with Caradoc’s socks drying in the tub and a pot of tea brewing on the scrubbed kitchen table, all while he itched and itched and itched to put the dog on and go running in the forest and tempt Death Eaters to throw curses at him that taught him new words for pain. 

“I don’t have to tell you that it’s a good thing he’s going back to Hogwarts,” Remus had said lightly the other night, as they watched Ron and Hermione take turns reading the term book list over Harry’s shoulder. They’d spent half the afternoon cleaning, and Sirius could taste the house at the back of his throat still, astringent and evil. 

He’d turned a page in the book, not looking up. “Yes,” he’d agreed. “You don’t.”

Now, he stubs his cigarette out in the bottom of the fine boned porcelain cup. If he’s lucky, it’ll leave a permanent scorch mark. “So that’s what you look like when you’re angry at me,” he says, thoughtfully. “Good to know.”

Harry’s scowl deepens. “M’not angry.” He tosses the book aside. “I’m bored. Come fuck me.”

Sirius snorts. “You’re a terror,” he says, “like, sexually speaking.”

That morning during breakfast, Harry had licked raspberry jam off his spoon, tongue curling against bright flashes of metal, for an interminable eight seconds, which Sirius thought was appropriate – one second for every person in the room who would happily murder him if they knew that not four hours prior Harry had been sliding that tongue along Sirius’ prick. 

Harry presses his hand between his legs, then rolls over onto his side, flopping backwards in a messy sprawl. A scroll of parchment and his new spellbook slides off the edge of the bed, landing with a thump and a softer creak. 

“Ooh, aren’t we tetchy,” Sirius comments, feeling his pulse pick up. He curves forward until he’s hovering above Harry’s face, stuck somewhere between put off and turned on, and then keeps going until he can rub his stubbled jaw against Harry’s belly. When Harry jerks with sensitivity and makes a choked off noise of protest, he does it again, then rolls until he’s curled perpendicular to him, resting his cheek there on the warm basin of Harry’s stomach, peering up to where Harry’s watching him with his mouth open, a little breathless. 

“You’re in a weird mood,” he comments, and Sirius does not say, _no shit_ and he does not say, _you’re the one in a weird mood_ and he does not say _I’m fucking a fifteen year old who’s leaving me again in less than three days I think I’m entitled to a bit of a mood_.

He does say, “Been wanting to kiss you all day,” and watches the bloom of Harry’s smile. 

“You could’ve,” Harry says softly, conspiratorial with his hair on end and his mouth a scythe of longing and his collarbones achingly sharp. “Could’ve dragged me off into a bathroom or a cupboard or – or that guest room at the end of the hallway on the third floor? The one no one’s using? Kissed me. Put your tongue in my mouth.” He drops his elbows, cricks his neck so he can keep Sirius in his line of sight. His face is all pink. “I could’ve done – that, like we did last night, again. If you’d wanted. I think you liked it.”

Sirius groans, a rictus of horrified laughter threatening to spill up the shape of his spine and crawl out his mouth. What has he done?

“I did like it,” he says, soft and bracingly, when he looks up to see Harry is still peering at him, a bit crooked, his glasses gone lopsided on his face. “It was – you were brilliant,” he says, again, the words coming easy like they had the other night, Harry’s mouth stretched over the head of his prick, tongue working at the underside like he was trying to copy what Sirius had done to him. He tugs gently on Harry’s wrist and Harry leverages up unhesitatingly, clambering onto Sirius’ hips. He gets tangled, briefly, in the sheets, and winds up panting, looking down his nose at Sirius beneath him. 

“Good,” Harry says, and his voice is so solemn it’s almost other-worldly. 

“You were lovely, doing that,” Sirius says, trying to make him understand, “But I don’t care – I mean, it doesn’t matter to me what we do. I just want you to feel good.”

“Alright,” Harry says, looking away, scrunching his nose where his glasses are sliding down it. 

“Harry.”

“I believe you,” Harry insists. 

“Well, you’re unhappy about it. Or annoyed at me.” He touches Harry’s ribs, runs his hands up his flank. “Do you want to go back to your room?”

Harry hisses an upset noise from between his teeth. “I’ve only been here an hour,” he protests, voice a little louder than it should be. 

“I know.” He leverages forward and kisses Harry’s sternum. “I know that.”

“Well.”

“I just want to make you happy, Harry, that’s the only – genuinely the only - ”

“You do,” Harry insists, and he rolls off of Sirius, spine tight and shoulders like jagged pieces of stone. 

“Evidently.”

Harry glares at him. The moon ticks over in the sky. “I love you,” Sirius says, at the same time that Harry says, haltingly, “Why did you need to bring up Ron?”

Ah, Sirius thinks, heart turning over like a stone unearthed ungently and without care for what it was resting against. Serves you right, what with fucking a fifteen-year-old, he tells himself. For the hundredth time that day. That hour. 

“Because I’m an arsehole, apparently,” he says, looking at the ceiling, and isn’t surprised when he hears Harry pulling his shirt back on. 

“I should sleep,” Harry says, each word heavy with reluctance. Sirius quickly evaluates and discards 1) kissing him, 2) offering to rub his back, 3) telling him to stay the night and 4) making a getaway on Buckbeak in the middle of the night through the massive windows in his father’s study, breaking through them and glass shattering like a riot of noise around them, lifting off into the hateful sky. He does nothing. His heart is beating in his chest, a slow, patient, death-waiting kind of noise. He’s still considering this when he hears the door snick open and then close again, quietly, like he was always alone after all. 

 

 

When Harry comes to him the next night, Sirius kisses him before the door’s all the way closed. Harry loops his arms around him, touches the side of Sirius’ face with the flat of his palm. They fuck almost silently, Harry on top of him and rutting his cock against the cut of Sirius’ hip, Sirius holding on to Harry’s forearms and unable to look away from his serious, tight face, the open bud of his mouth and the sweet curl of hair that keeps falling into his eyes. At the end, Sirius breathes, “That’s it, Harry, c’mon pup,” and glances down to watch Harry’s abdominals tighten, his hips stuttering and jackrabbiting. 

He pushes his own hips up to meet the fuck of Harry’s thrust, even though his cock has gone mostly untouched the whole evening except for the occasional, accidental brush of Harry’s thigh. “You fuck me so well, with that pretty cock of yours,” he bites out.

“Oh,” Harry whimpers. “ _Oh_.”

“You like that? Big lad, holding me down, fucking me through it? Fuck, Harry, come on, mark me with it, I want to smell like it, want to remember how you held me down and fucked me and came all over me,” he says, encouragingly, and Harry makes a noise like he’s been slapped and comes like a feral animal, streaking Sirius from hip to jaw. 

Breathless, still trembling, eyes wild and alight, Harry kisses him, hard and forceful on the mouth, more teeth and jaw than anything else. “Now you do it to me,” he says, and Sirius does, until they’re both filthy, animal-things, breaking the night apart on the shape of their tangled, furious bodies. 

 

 

September 1st dawns like a shard of cracked light. He wakes Harry at the first of its crooked touch and kisses him back to his bed, and then he scrapes the night from his face and changes into clean robes, ones that don’t smell like their bodies and all the places they’ve touched.

In the kitchen, he pulls Harry aside and shoves a package into his hands. “Use it, if you need me,” he says, and the look Harry gives him is like a fist squeezing around his heart. “Use it,” he insists, and knows prophetically that he won’t. 

The pantry smells like flour and last night’s dinner and like everything in this house - dust, dust, dust. “Harry,” he says, and then doesn’t say anything else, as Harry pushes him against a wall of tinned peaches and kisses him with a dark crush of fury and heartsick. 

“Sirius,” he breathes, frenetic, pulse pounding in his throat, the tips of his fingers, the circumference of his touch on Sirius’ wrist. 

“I love you,” Sirius tells him, words brushed against his temple at the last minute. “Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

Sirius nods. Someone is calling their names. Stepping forward, he puts on the dog, and together they walk out into the wild, sunlit world, waiting for what comes next.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! I treasure your feedback! <3


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